What happened to the global economy and what we can do about it
Search Results for: Daron Acemoglu
By James Kwak David Brooks has competition for the title of most inane New York Times columnist. I generally never read anything by Thomas Friedman—I gave up less than one hundred pages of The World Is Flat because of his blissfully uninformed discussion of workflow software—but I made an exception today because of this brilliant tweet by Benjamin Kunkel: … Continue reading Just Saying We’re Great Doesn’t Make It So
By Simon Johnson. This post draws on issues discussed in class #6 of Entrepreneurship without Borders, a course at MIT Sloan. The syllabus and other materials are available here. The US has a long and generally successful track record of using “economic statecraft” to advance its positions and values in the world. We helped rebuild … Continue reading Economic Statecraft, Women, and the Federal Reserve
By Simon Johnson Below is a summary of points from Class #4 of Entrepreneurship without Borders, a course at MIT Sloan. Use this link to look at earlier sessions. The conventional view about entrepreneurship in emerging markets is that it is difficult or perhaps impossible for new start-ups to have a great deal of impact. Local markets … Continue reading Entrepreneurial Endeavor
By James Kwak If there is a central argument to 13 Bankers, it is that politics matters. The financial crisis was the result of a long-term transformation of the financial sector and its place in the overall economy, and that transformation occurred because of—and contributed to—a shift in the political balance of power. Daron Acemoglu and … Continue reading The Costs of “Good” Economics
By James Kwak It is common fare for people like me to point disapprovingly to the revolving door between business and government, which ensures that every Treasury Department is well stocked with representatives of Goldman Sachs. In 13 Bankers, the revolving door was one of the three major channels through which the financial sector influenced government … Continue reading Revolving Doors Matter
By Simon Johnson Perhaps the biggest issue of this presidential election is the relationship between government and private business. President Obama recently offended some people by appearing to imply that private entrepreneurs did not build their companies without the help of others (although there is some debate about what he was really saying). Mitt Romney’s … Continue reading Who Built That?
By Simon Johnson “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty,” by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, is a brilliant and sometimes breathtaking survey of country-level governance over history and around the world. Professors Acemoglu and Robinson discern a simple pattern – when elites are held in check, typically by effective legal mechanisms, … Continue reading Jamie Dimon And The Fall Of Nations
By Simon Johnson, co-author of White House Burning A decision on choosing the next president of the World Bank is expected this week – perhaps as early as Monday. The Obama administration nominated Jim Yong Kim, president of Dartmouth College and a noted public health expert. The reaction to this nomination from development economists and … Continue reading Jim Yong Kim For The World Bank
By Simon Johnson “Populism” is a loaded term in modern American politics. On the one hand, it conveys the idea that someone represents (or claims to represent) the broad mass of society against a privileged elite. This is a theme that plays well on the right as well as the left – although they sometimes … Continue reading Responsible Populism
By Simon Johnson A dispute has broken out between the Cato Institute, a leading libertarian think tank, and two of its longtime backers – David and Charles Koch. The institute is not the usual form of nonprofit but actually a company with shares; the Koch brothers own two of the four shares and are arguing … Continue reading The Koch Brothers, The Cato Institute, And Why Nations Fail
By Simon Johnson. This post is the first few paragraphs of a column now available at Project Syndicate. The United States continues to be riven by heated debate about the causes of the 2007-2009 financial crisis. Is government to blame for what went wrong, and, if so, in what sense? In December, the Republican minority … Continue reading “Fannie Mae Made Me Do It”
Over on the Economist Roundtable, my colleague Daron Acemoglu makes several important points. We now have some financial institutions (and perhaps nonfinancial firms also) that have such strong and deep political connections, they will not be allowed to go bankrupt. This is a reality we must face. Assuming that we can address such a deep political … Continue reading Too Connected To Fail
Testimony to Congressional Committees, 2008-2010: complete list, with links Testimony to Congressional Committees, 2011-12: Testimony to Senate Budget Committee, February 1st, 2011: hearing on the economic outlook Testimony to Congressional Oversight Panel, TARP, March 4th, 2011: TARP’s Impact on Financial Stability Testimony to Joint Economic Committee of Congress, June 21, 2011: hearing on fiscal policy … Continue reading Simon’s Papers
We are not short of causes for our current economic crisis. The basic machinery of capitalism, including the process of making loans, did not work as it was supposed to. Capital flows around the world proved much more destabilizing than even before (and we’ve seen some damaging capital flows over the past 200 years.) And … Continue reading Causes: Economics
The Economic Crisis The global financial crisis of fall 2008 was unexpected. A few people had been predicting that serious problems were looming, and even fewer had placed bets accordingly, but even they were astounded by what happened in mid-September. What did happen? There are many layers to unpeel, but let me begin with the … Continue reading The Economic Crisis and the Crisis in Economics
The Baseline Scenario 